Kyrael
by Kermit's Sister
Summary: I've been wondering why Garth Nix hasn't published more lately. Well, I decided to do something about it! I give you... Kyrael! When not-quite-so ordinary things hap[pen to her on almost a daily basis, does she panic? No! She's the Abhorsen-in-Waiting!
1. Chapter 1: The Meeting Of The Eight

A tall, silvery-haired man with wicked green eyes had walked long and far. His flowing white robe brushed the ground as he strode along, blending in with the snow left over from a few days ago. He stopped at a small, frozen stream and gazed upon its surface;

He saw a face behind him. A woman of medium height with curly dark hair and a tan tunic and breeches over a red under-shirt peeked over his left shoulder. Her expressive grey eyes twinkled at him.

"Well met, friend Yrael. Gazing at yourself again, I see." The woman said, attempting a mystical tone like that of the Clayr and failing miserably. Yrael burst out in uncharacteristic giggles.

"Well met, Kibeth. Just as ridiculous as usual, I see." Yrael replied, turning around to face the woman, who, if you looked at out of the corner of your eye would appear to be a large, black-and-tan mutt of indiscriminate origin.

The two walked on together in silent conversation.

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Kyrael sat on the landing stage of Abhorsen's House, reading and dangling her feet in the water. Her short, light brown hair blew in the wind, into her violet-grey eyes and over her Charter mark. She turned another page in _The Book of the Dead_ and continued to read- this page described the best uses of Charter-made daggers against Free Magic constructs.

"_If you are over running water and a Construct of the Second Kindred or above attempts to charge, use Charter daggers (marks indexed in back) in concordance with a Charter net (marks indexed) to bind and break the creature, then call out the sixteenth master mark if you have no bells; bind the net under the water and the Construct will be defeated. If you are facing a Construct of a lower nature, to simply lure it into the water will be enough to bind it temporarily. Then, if you wish to send a Construct of any kind to its final demise, so that it may not be raised again, take Kibeth and Saraneth from your bandolier. Ring Kibeth above your head in clockwise half-circles, six at a time with the clapper scraping along and back around the bell rim each time. During your half-peals of Kibeth ring Saraneth in a vertical line, from right to left, then a horizontal line from north to south. Ring Kibeth in a standard Demmare's Peal (described on Page 622) and then shout "Return to Death and walk beyond the Ninth Gate, to be raised again nevermore!" The shout and Demmare's Peal are essential- if you have not the time for the rest of the ritual, one clockwise half-peal of Kibeth , the Demmare's Peal and the shout will suffice to shackle the Construct at the Eighth Gate, where you may go and finalize your binding when you have more time on your hands."_

"Huh." Kyrael said out loud, flipping to the index.

"_Dagger, Charter-made. Use a mark of blinding and binding, six of locking, barring and breaking, and the seventh Circled mark, sealed with the twentieth Righted master mark of fire and air, take six swings clockwise of the arm and throw at desired object."_

"Huh." Kyrael said, with considerably more interest, dipping into the Charter for the marks and sealing them together in her hand with the master mark. She swung her arm six times backward and let fly; the dagger impaled itself next to the lintel-post of the door into the tunnel under the Long Cliffs, nearly catching her father's shirt as he passed through to the stepping-stones.

"Kyrael! _Please_ be more careful where you cast your Charter-spells!" Nicholas Sayre, husband of the Abhorsen Lirael Goldenhand called out, picking up the dagger gingerly with two fingers. It appeared to be metal, solid albeit glowing. It suddenly fizzled out of existence as Kyrael spoke a combating master mark to the one that bound it together.

"Hey! I wanted to look at that, Kyr!" Nicholas called, hopping across the stepping-stones and ending up next to Kyrael as she shut _The Book of the Dead_ with a snap.

"Oh, I'll show it to you later, Dad. Right now I think it's time for lunch." Kyrael said, opening the gate and tearing up the path as a sending banged on the gong that signaled everyone it was time for a meal.

Nicholas followed, at a more normal pace.

"Hey sis." Michael called, from his spot at the table.

"Hiya Michael. Where's mum?" Kyrael said inquiringly.

"Oh- about ten minutes ago she got a message from New Barhedrin, near the Wall. They have a few Haunts and a Ghlim roaming the outer edges of their village. Nothing Mother can't handle." Michael said, digging into his shepherd's pie.

"Alright. I wonder why there was a Ghlim so far south, though." Kyrael said, sitting down opposite Michael.

"S'h phobhy nufigg f' uwwy 'bout." Nicholas said, his mouth full of food.

"DA-ad!" the two children cried.

"Well, yeah. Shuffigg. What a word." Kyrael said dryly. As the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, it should have been _she_ who'd gone, instead of Mother, who was still tired from banishing Mordicants that had been plaguing Beldevere last week.

Kyrael quickly finished her food and went to the library, to see if there was anything on a Ghlim near Barhedrin in the past. She ran her finger along a row of bookshelves, stopping at a slim, clothbound volume. "_History of the Borderlands of the Wall and Barhedrin Hill"_ she read aloud. "Well, this should do it." She said, flipping to the index.

"_Ghouls... Grims..._GHLIMS! Got it!" she said excitedly, flipping to the appropriate page.

"_There have only been two Ghlims of note in the Borderlands, one of which continually plagued the village of Barhedrin for over a century. It was bound inside an anvil by the twentieth Abhorsen, Erimael the White. Erimael was so named because she was the fist Abhorsen to have all color leached from her skin while passing into Death to bind a necromancer."_ She read.

Kyrael took the book with her and ran to the mews to send a message-hawk to her mother. Maybe it was the Ghlim previously trapped!

She quickly scribbled a message to her mother and told it to the message-hawk, sending it on its way with a Charter-spell to make sure it didn't stop until it had delivered its message.

She took the book back to the library and put it and_ The Book of the Dead_ on their respective shelves. It was interesting that no Abhorsen before Erimael the White had had color leached from their skin because they crossed into Death, Kyrael thought.

Kyrael headed to the orchard and picked some peaches, then handed them to a nearby sending and told it to go make peach pie. The sending delightedly rushed off on its task and Kyrael was left in peace. She climbed up the nearest peach tree and sat, her back against the trunk, balanced on a branch. She cast a Charter-spell of warding and hiding to keep anybody from disturbing her and promptly fell asleep.

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Yrael and the Seven gathered in a sacred clearing. "Who shall go first?" Questioned a tall, serious man with a cheerful ten-year-old girl sitting on his shoulders.

"I-_yawn_- shall." Answered Ranna from her cloud, where she floated between Mosrael and Saraneth.

And Ranna stepped forward into the silver- glowing circle and disappeared.

"I next." Said Dyrim, from Belgaer's shoulders. She too walked into the circle and disappeared. This continued until there were only Astarael and Yrael left.

"I trust you will not forget your promise, brother." Said Astarael, stepping into the circle and vanishing too.

"Oh, lackaday and bother! I hope I can get a lot of fish!" Grumbled Yrael, doing the same as the others before him- except this time, the circle vanished with him.

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Kyrael awoke with a jolt. She'd thought she was Yrael... or Kibeth there for a second! Shaking off the strange notion, she removed the spell cloaking the tree and went back into the House.

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So what do you think? If this is stupid, I'll stop. Please review!

Stock tips, death threats, premonitions and horseshit are welcome! (As long as you review)


	2. Chapter 2: Of Boxes And Bathrooms

Thanks for your reviews, everyone! I am grateful to you. Well, here goes!

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Kyrael was bored. She'd even persuaded her sending-attendant not to clean her bathroom so she could do it; a chore she royally despised. She wondered what had gotten into her.

Maybe it was that strange dream, she thought. Or maybe she was just lazy from not doing anything in a long time. Anything fun, like a prank, or serious, like binding the Dead.

Kyrael decided she was annoying herself and should stop and just concentrate on scrubbing the toilet. It appeared her sending cast _illusory_ cleaning spells instead of the real ones- the toilet was filthy! She'd have to take this job off of the sending's list of chores. She'd also have to retire the _really_ senile one that had just popped out of the wall one day and commenced throwing her in the bathtub- at six o'clock in the evening!

Kyrael always took a shower in the _morning_. She'd gotten her gorgeous new silver surcoat quartered with black Abhorsen's keys and her father's personal emblem of a baptismal Charter mark and sword all wet, too!

"Argh." Kyrael mumbled in memory. At least the surcoat had dried- she liked to wear it a lot. Out of curiosity, she opened the secret vent in the wall that she'd discovered last year. It had been cloaked with a Charter-spell then, but as nobody but Kyrael used her bathroom, she'd removed the spell. A jeweled box fell out.

"Well _that_ certainly wasn't here before." She said out loud, the toilet finished for now. The vent usually contained a sword sheathed on its wall, pointing down the duct toward the mews, where she could listen in on whoever was sending a message. Kyrael took the box to her room and locked the door with three spells she was sure nobody else in her family knew how to unlock. She opened the box on her bed- surprisingly the spell over it required no activating Charter mark to work.

The lid creaked open gently-aha! There was an inscription inside!

"_I belong to the fifty-fifth Abhorsen, to be found by her on the second day after Midsummer. She is Kyrael, daughter of Lirael Goldenhand, and this box will open to none other- even of the same Blood."_ It read. It was a strange thing. Kyrael didn't go about as a habit finding strange jeweled boxes in her vent that proclaimed her to be Abhorsen and would open to none other!

Kyrael looked at the contents of the box and gasped, then giggled. Her cousin Samira would be _so_ jealous- and _Samira_ got to wear the Crown Jewels on a daily basis!

Nestled in powder blue velvet were six things- a key carved from ebony suspended on a golden chain, a silver necklace with an emerald the size of Kyrael's thumb nail suspended in silver filigree for a pendant, a book bound in silver silk, a book bound in blue silk the match of the lining of the box, a silver ring with a single ruby on it, and a Charter-spelled blade that looked like a Yamani... what was it? Oh yeah. Kodachi! It had a silver hilt and Charter-spelled platinum blade, and a very polished, very round piece of ebony set as the pommel stone.

Kyrael lifted the kodachi out of the box and read its inscription.

"_I was made for Abhorsen Kyrael to bind the Dead."_ The inscription said, before the letters shimmered into a new arrangement._ "Beware, Kyrael, for in other than practice, no sword but I shall you heft."_

"Whoa." Kyrael mumbled, glad she hadn't gotten a sword from the Armory to use, as her mother had wanted Kyrael to do.

Kyrael put on the emerald necklace- it turned out to be a choker that fit perfectly. She slipped the key on the golden chain over her head-_ it_ dangled down so that the key rested beneath her shirt, almost to her natural waist. She grabbed the silver book from the box and noticed it had spells more powerful than those upon _The Book of the Dead_ on it!

It too had an inscription.

"_Only my children and those with my spirit can, or should open this Book of Yrael." _The inscription read.

"But that's not possible!" Kyrael cried, knowing that the Abhorsen line was descended solely from Kibeth and Astarael, who sometimes inhabited the tunnels under Abhorsen's House.

"_Oh yes it is!"_ The inscription read now.

"Great. A talking inscription." Kyrael said, as much to the _Book of Yrael_ as to herself

"_No, simply an inscription that you talk to."_ It read.

"I s'pose I have to read this now." Kyrael sighed.

"_Ditto."_ It said.

Kyrael began to read and by the time she was done with the book, it was midnight, even though she'd started at roughly two in the afternoon. She picked up the blue book, strangely not tired at all. It was an empty diary, filled with pages of creamy vellum.

Kyrael neatly signed her name on the first page.

_Kyrael Sayre, Abhorsen-in-Waiting, aged fifteen. This is MY DIARY so keep out!!!_

It seemed like the correct thing to write. As soon as she'd finished, marks swam into view on the cover. It would now only open to her and future Abhorsen.

Her first entry described the box, what was in it, what she'd been doing that day and how she'd found the box. She signed the page "Kyrael". And that was that.

"Mum- what would _you_ do if you found a box full of random objects in your bathroom vent?" She said sleepily to the air.

The air did not answer.

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Kyrael dreamed she saw the world from a cloud; she dreamed of what had been and what would be. She dreamed of her mother, fighting the Dead, sometimes with Kyrael by her side; she dreamed of everyone she'd ever known and ever would know.

Unbeknownst to her, this was what Yrael had meant many years earlier when he'd said _"I can see time."_ For Yrael had had many dream-visions like this one- and some during the day as well.

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So how was it? Less choppy? Better, perhaps?

As in the last chapter, stock tips, death threats, premonitions and horse shit are welcome (as long as you review!)

It will take three reviews for me to continue, as I only got 2 for the last chapter.


	3. Chapter 3: Of Prophecies and Peculiarity

Lirael screamed in unrelenting agony as the Ghlim plunged its claw into her golden hand and drew out a strange ebony lock.

"One step closer, yesssss…" it hissed under its breath, its face split ear to ear by its gash of a mouth contorting in a too-long grin.

It cast another spell of Free Magic at the trussed-up woman; her scream was pitched much higher and trailed off as the Abhorsen collapsed in a dead faint, bloody and battered.

The Ghlim stood roughly six feet tall, its arms and legs disproportionately long and its skin pure ebony. Its eyes were pools of molten fire and its hair was long and crackling silver, curly and tied back with a red silken cord. It wore a plain white tunic and breeches and a peculiar band of mahogany wood around its wrist with an ebony key dangling off it.

The Ghlim took the wooden bracelet off and fitted the key into the lock; a pinprick of intense golden light shone out of the middle of the keyhole and shone brighter and brighter until the Ghlim was almost completely blinded; it did not see as the key dissolved into the lock and the lock melted away into nothingness.

The night-black skin on the large, spiderlike hand of the Ghlim began to bubble and melt; as the creature screamed in anguish its body turned slowly and inorexably to a puddle of pure blackness, running down and seeping into a crack in the steel anvil on which the creature had formerly perched and disappearing for all eternity.

The dark brown eyes of the Abhorsen flickered open.

She groaned as a message-hawk settled on her stomach. Her golden hand, now healed by its own peculiar power, reached up and took the message from the bird. She cracked it open.

Her daughter's voice, panicked and rushed, spilled out into the dusky evening sky.

"Mum! The Ghlim is one of seven that were sealed in anvils around Barhedrin and it's really, really powerful! The book that I was looking through said something about the seven keys to Eternity that they hold or some such… and something about locks… let me, uh…" Kyrael's voice trailed off for a second and Lirael heard the sound of a page turning, magically amplified.

"_Seven keys to wake the wakers,_

_Seven locks to bind the Dread,_

_Seven Dread to wake the One,_

_Seven hands to see it done,_

_Seven days to pursue to completion,_

_Seven that have come before to assure passage._

_Seven times seventy willing-souled will be possessed,_

_Seven souls scattered like candle flames in the night can see the Evil gone from the world._

_Seven will cleanse._

_Eight will rise._

_Two in the girl and_

_One in the mother,_

_One in the father but_

_None in the other. _

_Three bound and kept within the Keep of Stars,_

_One in the soul of a mindbender._

_All will join together and stop the _

_Reign of the Dread_

_From occurring again._

The prophecy or whatever is dated… four thousand years ago, and it was made by Aramathaelle, the Voice of the Nine Day Watch of the Clayr. That's all I found… see you soon?" Kyrael's hopeful voice vanished into thin air as the paper curled in on itself and burned with a cold fire until only bits of grey ash were left in Lirael's palm.

Somewhere distant, a wolf howled.

Trees rustled.

Lirael scooted backward as quickly as she could move her bruised and battered body as the air around her suddenly seemed to have all feeling and life sucked from it; it became as unbearably cold as the river of Death. Unbeknownst to her, ice crystals were beginning to form on her eyelashes.

The Abhorsen's eyes rolled back in her head and she was seemingly dragged into Death.

She awoke to the crooning of a lilted voice. She lay on a forested island in the middle of the river of Death… but there were no islands there! She had not entered Death! Her mind raced as she tried to comprehend what had happened.

She suddenly noticed that all her aches and pains were gone as a woman who appeared to be her twin stepped out from between the trees.

The shock and surprise that Lirael felt were mirrored in the face of the other.

"Who… are you?" the other asked hesitantly in a voice that rang uncannily with very familiar musical chimes…. Almost like one of her bells!

Lirael's hand drifted to the ebony handle of her favorite but least-used bell, Astarael.

"Don't touch it!" the woman commanded, her sharply angled face wrought with anger.

"Uh… alright," Lirael said awkwardly. "I'm Lirael Goldenhand. I'm the Abhorsen… currently…" she trailed off.

"Which one are you? There have been many who have wielded me over the years." The woman spoke.

"I'm the fifty-fourth one. Are you… who are you, if I may ask?" said Lirael boldly, perhaps more boldly than she should have.

"I… am you. But I am also Astarael," the woman said simply.

"How can _you_ be _me_?" Lirael half shouted.

Astarael sighed.

"Because that's just the way it is. Now, are we going to get out of your mind and go defeat the Haunts currently tying you up _again_, or are we going to stand here all day?" the woman asked impatiently.

With a peculiar shudder, Lirael was thrown back into her body, but the presence of Astarael remained in her mind.

'_Use my bell. Or your bell, rather. It'll respond the best to you- but it always has, hasn't it?'_ the ghostly voice of Lirael's other self chimed in her mind.

Lirael drew the bell and rang it in slow circles, singing at the same time for a reason she did not understand. Her will _would_ be enforced on these lower beings. The three impish faces turned up towards her, their dull black eyes glinting in surprise. They chittered amongst themselves and ran.

Astarael brought the full power of the river of Death to bear on the three miscreants who had dared to escape her.

They were pulled, slowly but surely, back towards the woman, turning transparent and nearly gaseous as the pixie-like creatures tried to use their own brand of magic to fight the much, much stronger pull of the tall woman with flashing, cold steel-grey eyes.

The three columns of smoke were pulled into the bell and with a final squeal from the other side by one of the Haunts, Lirael snapped back into being.

"That was… weird," she mumbled, staring at the bell crafted finely of steel and amber, lying dormant in her hand.

She opened her mind and instantly volumes of power rushed through it.

"Oh my," were the only word she could get out before she fell into unconsciousness again.

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